The Difference Between Doing Something Well and Doing Something Smart

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I’ve been having some discussions with a good friend of mine over the past few weeks regarding social media.  He just got back from a conference in Arizona.  The conference was full of CEO’s and corporate executives who were (in his words), “drooling over social media,” and he was not at all happy about it.

It seems that as social media has become a more mainstream method of advertising, corporate leaders have begun to  interpret the phenomenon as a magic moneymaking pill. They assume that if they have a Twitter account, or a Facebook fan page that the dollah-billz will just start pouring in.

If history has proven one thing, it’s that there are no magic bullets or secret formulas.  Adapting this incorrect opinion of social media is foolishness.

Social media cannot make a crappy product, a poorly run business, or a weak marketing plan successful.  It’s possible that your product is amazing, your company is groundbreaking and your marketing is visionary, and that social media still isn’t meant for you.

The catch 22 right now is that social media marketing is something that the early adapters don’t want to miss out on, but it’s so new that there are currently very few ways to measure ROI.

So, before committing to jumping on the social media bandwagon, make sure you have goals in mind and a defined value that you would like to glean from your efforts.  Without some sort of metric to track or goal to measure, your efforts in social media will be hollow and fruitless. And, just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean you should be doing it.